Editor's note: Scout Tafoya's latest edition of "The Unloved" might be my favorite installment to date, and not just because it breaks from the usual format and considers two films rather than concentrating on just one. It is an exercise in discovery, challenging conventional wisdom in the gentlest way. I like both "Heaven's Gate" and "The Lone Ranger" more than most critics (the last one notoriously more; follow the link and see). Plus, I tend to like Westerns, or at least find them interesting, even if parts of them don't work, because they're so rare these days, and for various reasons so demanding.

But I'd never considered the similarities that the two films share until I watched Scout's video.

There are a lot. And I mean a lot.

On a superficial level, both movies represented huge financial and artistic gambles. The commercial climate for Westerns was only slightly more hospitable in 1981, when "Heaven's Gate" came out, than in 2013, when director Gore Verbinski tried to revive the legend of the Masked Man. Both directors broke the bank making films audiences found confusing, irritating or tedious. "Heaven's Gate" was written off by critics and the handful of viewers who saw it as as an overlong, pompous, politically and dramatically incoherent example of '70s auteurism at its most indulgent. Its commercial failure nearly destroyed its studio. "The Lone Ranger" was rapped for its drastic tonal shifts, and for casting Verbinski regular Johnny Depp, whose claims of Native American ancestry have been disputed, as the Lone Ranger's friend and mentor, Tonto. But I always thought there was substance to the admittedly grandiose gestures of Cimino's epic. I fell in love with (some might say fell for) "The Lone Ranger" as well.

Even as a pre-film-literate middle schooler, I was fascinated by "Heaven's Gate" because it didn't look, feel or move like any Western I'd seen. It was long and slow and intensely physical (Cimino notoriously built entire towns with functioning interiors and exteriors, an indulgence that would't be permitted again until HBO bankrolled "Deadwood"). Also notable: the film was largely devoid of traditional gunfighter-movie cliches. It told the story of fully assimilated American whites oppressing more recent immigrants, a scenario few Hollywood films had shown us (not on this scale, anyway, or in the Old West; the closest thematic equivalent might have been first two "Godfather" films, or maybe Jan Troell's "The Immigrants"). Cimino's movie tried to show how the myth of Manifest Destiny was made real through sweat, blood and misery, mostly in the name of commerce. It showed an expansion undertaken mainly for the benefit of bankers, railway and mining companies, and at the expense of marginalized groups, specifically the suffering immigrants.

As Scout's video points out, "The Lone Ranger" has a heck of a lot of similarities to "Heaven's Gate," including a narrative of Manifest Destiny as capitalist nightmare (but with Native Americans rather than European immigrants being trampled upon). Its style is altogether more daring than Cimino's, which functioned mainly in a single mode (lavish tragedy). Verbinski's film starts out as a "Heaven's Gate" type exercise in myth-puncturing, with an aged Tonto relating the "real" story of the American west to a credulous 20th century boy in a Lone Ranger outfit. But because the whole thing is presented as a Native American's flashback, it seems less a refutation of lies than a counter-myth, to use Oliver Stone's great phrase. (Since I published this piece, a friend pointed out that you could see "The Lone Ranger" as the boy's memory of the story that Tonto told him—which makes it a story about a story about a story, and ultimately a film about history as storytelling: the "Grand Budapest Hotel" of action westerns, maybe?)

At any rate, "The Lone Ranger" is wild and elastic, a cantankerous old man's yarn about his youth. There are exaggerations, digressions, omissions, and flashes of perversity. We'll watch an outlaw cut a man's heart out of his chest or hear a recollection of a massacre and accept the horror at face value. But these scenes will be nestled beside examples of classically styled Hollywood spectacle (Verbinski stages some key scenes in Monument Valley, John Ford's old stomping grounds) or outrageous slapstick (the final locomotive chase is modeled on Buster Keaton's silent comedy "The General," and Helena Bonham Carter shows up as a frontier madam with a Gatling gun for a leg). Ford and Clint Eastwood's influence are accounted for, and there are flashes of Sergio Leone, Sam Raimi, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Laurel and Hardy. You could say it's all too much, and that a lot of it doesn't work, and you wouldn't be wrong. But like Cimino's movie, "The Lone Ranger" recombined its old elements into something ungainly yet fresh. No one with honest eyes could look at it and say, "Oh, no—not another one of these."

Nor was it possible to claim that the films had nothing in the heads, or on their minds. Nestled within the sooty nimbus of "Heaven's Gate" and the cartoon campfire glow of "The Lone Ranger" you'll find a pair of laments. As Scout puts it, "The films concern America's shameful treatment of immigrants and indigenous people, respectively. They couch their bloody histories in almost stifling artistry: a painter's grandiose vision of a land claimed for those apparently destined to have it. Both films fear the future, because with the brutality of an edit, happiness and progress become distant memories. Those who had it in them to make a difference were denied the chance by reality."--Matt Zoller Seitz

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tag:www.rogerebert.com,2005:BlogPost/54f2c36a2afe7b45790000332015-03-01T01:44:00-06:002015-03-02T13:49:42-06:00Notes on watching "Aliens" for the first time again, with a bunch of kidsMatt Zoller Seitz

For his 11th birthday, my son asked if he could have a slumber party. He invited seven other fifth-grade boys. They played video games for a couple of hours, ate pizza, then said they wanted to watch a movie. They'd seen every comic book movie multiple times. Seen all the Indiana Jones films. Star Wars. Anything with a hobbit in it. The usual 11-year old boy options, circa 2015, weren't going to work.

So I suggested "Aliens," thinking, "Well, it's exciting, and even if they haven't see the first one, the movie tells the story well enough that you won't be confused about who Ripley is and what's at stake for her."

They agreed (some of them had seen the first one anyway, and nearly all had seen at least one film with a xenomorph in it) and so we watched it together. And as we watched, I realized again that while unfortunately you can't see a great movie again for the first time, the next-best thing is to show it to people who've never seen it.

My first time with James Cameron's sci-fi war movie was a great filmgoing experience. I saw "Aliens" at the NorthPark 1 and 2 theater at NorthPark Mall in my hometown of Dallas, with a high school classmate who was, at that time, my regular action movie-watching buddy: Gabe Michaels. We drove to NorthPark to catch the 11 a.m. show on opening day and got in line a couple of hours early. We'd already drunk a bit of soda beforehand and I think we might have downed some more while standing in line. When we got into the theater, they seated us immediately and there was only one preview, for "The Fly," and then wham, they started the movie. Neither Gabe nor I nor anyone else who'd been standing in that line wanted to get up from our seats and answer nature's call, even though we all pretty desperately had to; there was a lot of muttering and shifting in seats, quite a few "grin and bear it" expressions.

If you've seen the film, you know there are no aliens to speak of for the first hour, then suddenly there are aliens all over the place, coming out of the walls and ceiling, drooling and shrieking and dragging Marines off into the darkness to be cocooned. It's one of the greatest releases of built-up tension in action film history. Throughout this sequence the audience was enthralled, screaming as the xenomorphs attacked, cheering as Ripley took control of the all-terrain vehicle to rescue the imperiled Colonial Marines. Then when the ATV crashed through the wall, the music stopped, and Hicks told her she'd blown the trans-axle and need to "ease down, Ripley, ease down," everyone collectively seemed to realize they were being given a breather, so at that point Gabe and I and probably a fifth of the audience rose from our seats and headed for the bathrooms: fast-walking, some running.

Guys at the urinals were peeing as fast as they could because they didn't want to miss another minute of "Aliens." You'd have thought somebody was timing them. Like this was the Olympic qualifying round for the bladder evacuation team. But they weren't going fast enough to suit a guy standing near the front door of the men's room. He yelled, "Goddammit! All of you, piss faster!"

And that's when I knew "Aliens" was going to be a hit.

Anyway, the slumber party: all kids seemed to agree that "Aliens" was a good suggestion because even though it had aliens in it, it wasn't just trying to scare you, like the first "Alien." "It's basically an action movie, that's what I've heard," one of my son's friends said. Another seemed just a little bit scared, maybe, and kept suggesting other viewing options, including "Guardians of the Galaxy," "Dr. Who," and (for some reason) "Saturday Night Live."

We watched "Aliens" anyway. It went over well. The biggest challenge was dissuading kids from trying to predict every single thing that was going to happen. This is a generation of talkers. They have to comment on everything. No thought can go unexpressed. Maybe this was true when I was a kid as well (I honestly don't remember), but rather than endlessly correct them I decided to just roll with it, exercising my slumber party guardian veto power during scenes that I felt pretty sure would enthrall them if they would just shut up for five minutes (I was rarely proved wrong in my guesses). But it was a sharp crowd, and for the most part the movie went over quite well, for an analog-era science fiction spectacular that's turning 30 next year.

One boy said that Ripley in her hyper sleep chamber looked like Sleeping Beauty. As this was an intentional reference on writer-director James Cameron's part (there's a Snow White reference an hour later) this seemed like a promising note on which to begin the screening. "I like the way this looks," one said. "It's futuristic but it's old school. It's almost steampunk." "This is like Team Fortress 2," another remarked. "Dude, shut up, this was made like 20 years before Team Fortress 2," said the kid next to him. "This is, like, every science fiction movie ever made," another said, as Ripley operated the power loader for the first time.

"This movie has so many cliches in it," a boy said when Colonial Marines disembarked the drop ship and made their way through rainy darkness to enter the alien-infested colony. My son told him, "This movie was made in 1986. It invented all the cliches." Another of his friends was impressed by the "personal data transmitters" implanted in the colonists—impressed that someone had thought of that back in 1986.

The first big jump of the night was the face hugger in the tank trying to "kiss" the evil yuppie Burke. All eight kids flipped out. One screamed. The second big jump of the night was the "please kill me" woman. Half the boys watched her through the cracks between their fingers.

They liked Ripley, Hicks, Frost, Apone, Bishop the android, and even Hudson, whose defeatism irritated them so much that I think they would've hated him if he weren't so funny. "Somebody shoot that guy," one said. Frost insisting that "it doesn't matter" when the "poontang" is Arcturian confused a couple of kids. "It means he's bisexual," one explained.

The cigar-chewing Sgt. Apone's oddly musical phrase "assholes and elbows" got the biggest laugh of the evening; two hours and twenty minutes later, the kids were quoting it as they brushed their teeth. Frost's quip, "What are we supposed to use, man, harsh language?" made my son laugh for nearly a full minute.

During the final alien assault (where they come through the ceiling panels!) a boy half-hidden under a blanket said, "I would commit suicide if I were in this position."

Vasquez was the MVP of the movie. I think all eight boys might have a little bit of a crush on her. When she pinned a xenomorph to a wall with her combat boot and blew its brains out, one exclaimed his delight with profanity, then apologized to me for it. Another boy said Vasquez reminded him of "this lady who works at Costco." He didn't say which Costco. There was a wave of applause for Lt. Gorman and Vasquez holding hands as they blew themselves up. ("She died like a boss," one said.)

There was general agreement amongst the boys that they would like to see a separate film of Newt surviving for weeks on the planet full of aliens. The final duel between the queen mother alien and Ripley in her power loader was a big hit. The boys applauded both combatants' tactics, especially Ripley blocking the queen's tongue-mouth jabs with her blowtorch. ("This is like boxing, except it's slower and they're both wearing armor.")

At bedtime there was some discussion of whether an army of predators could beat an army of aliens. The issue was never resolved. The boys had trouble settling down because every few minutes somebody would plant a palm on somebody's face or grab a toe. At one point, post-screening discussion was hijacked by a science minded boy describing his idea for an "acid-proof Colonial Marine uniform."

"There could be face huggers hiding under the couch right now," one said after a while. There was laughter at this. Then silence. Then stray nervous chuckles. Then a longer silence.

The boy who earlier had suggested alternatives to "Aliens" asked the first boy to "just shut up about the face huggers."

I very rarely wish I could be 11 again, but for these kids, I'm making an exception.

David Cronenberg is near the top of the list of directors whose works resist snap judgments. His mix of black comedy and unabashed melodrama is so delicate, and in some ways so off-putting, that at times it's hard to tell if he's kidding or serious (the answer is usually both). He's been described as a horror filmmaker, and his longstanding fascination with bodily invasion and the fragility of flesh confirms that label—or does it? A good many of his films play like horror movies even if they don't have genetic mutations or other obvious "monsters." Why? Maybe because he's less interested in gore and goo than in the beasts within: the monstrous nature of obsession and desire; the difficulty of escaping oneself, physically or emotionally; the cruelty of the societies that enfold and define his characters. Look back over Cronenberg's filmography, and you realize that he hasn't made an according-to-Hoyle horror picture since 1986's "The Fly." The horrific quality seems to come more from his being appalled by what people can be, and do—and from being sympathetic to their urges anyway.

"Maps to the Stars," written by Bruce Wagner, is another work in the good old Cronenbergian vein. Although it's been dismissed in some quarters as minor Cronenberg—and criticized for "getting Hollywood wrong," or something like that; as if "Dead Ringers" cared about the fine points of gynecology—it's a sneakily powerful movie, so much so that its conceptual thinness isn't a deal-breaker. Not for nothing did Cronenberg model his remake of "The Fly" on tragic opera, then re-stage it with his regular composer Howard Shore as an actual opera, with a libretto by David Henry Hwang. This new film's cast of anxious, duplicitous, sometimes violent creative types rattle off declamatory dialogue so overwrought that it could be treated as arias scored for a 40-piece orchestra. The characters inhabit a Los Angeles that seems as intimate, even inbred, as a stereotypical backwoods town: every other scene reveals that characters you didn't know were connected are, in fact, part of an extended family, united not just by blood, but hunger for validation. They want luxury and fame as well, but those are signifiers of what they're truly after: adoration. Love. Unconditional acceptance.

Julianne Moore stars as Havana Segrand, a formidable actress whose star has begun to fade now that she's passed 50. Like a lot of characters in this film—and a lot of characters in Cronenberg's films, period, and Wagner's fiction—she's defined by her tragic past, and knows this all too well, and is palpably desperate to escape it and re-create herself. Ironically, though (and appropriately, since this is Cronenberg) she's trying to escape herself by crawling deeper into a psychological cage that's enclosed her since birth: Havana wants to star in a biographical drama about her late mother Clarice Taggart (Sarah Gadon), a mercurial, psychologically and sexually abusive actress who could be a combination of Frances Farmer and Joan Crawford.

This one subplot, about an actress trying to master the awful memories of her mother by figuratively becoming her, gives you some clue what Cronenberg and Wagner are up to, not just with Havana but with all the major characters. Like Cronenberg's little-seen but fascinating "Spider," "Maps to the Stars" often feels like a ghost story made by people who don't believe in the supernatural. The mother appears to her daughter in a very straightforward way—as she might manifest herself in a theatrical production. But even though she's clearly an outgrowth of Havana's mangled psyche, you have to count her as an accusing spirit, rattling around in the haunted house of her daughter's damaged mind, and saying the most vile, undermining things. (As if the movie didn't already subtly echo "The Shining," Cronenberg has Clarice appearing to Havana in a bathtub: shades of room 237.)

Havana, who will do or say just about anything to play her mother and hopefully win an Oscar, is the most vivid of the film's troubled souls, thanks mainly to Moore's utter disinterest in seeming powerful or dignified or otherwise stereotypically movie star-like. From "Short Cuts" and "Safe" onward, this actress has played troubled, desperate or generally put-upon characters so often that the best actress Oscar she won for "Still Alice" might as well have been mounted on a torture rack. But Havana proves merely the brightest star in this film's constellation of scheming sufferers, a bunch whose manias are a bit too contrived and schematic, but which fascinate anyway, thanks to the actors' virtuosity and Cronenberg's control of tone.

Havana's regular therapist/masseuse/TV psychologist is a self-help guru named Dr. Stafford Weiss (John Cusack), a man who presents himself as selfless and caring, but seems determined to crack open repressed minds mainly so he can root around and provoke extreme reactions. (When Stafford manipulates Havana's body on a yoga mat, Cronenberg's staging suggests sex, sometimes rape.)

Havana's new personal assistant, Stafford's daughter Agatha Weiss (Mia Wasikowska), wears long gloves to cover arms that were burned in a mysterious fire; at first she seems almost Pollyanna-sweet, but soon enough she reveals a capacity for ruthlessness that rivals Havana's. The ghost story parallels continue via Agatha, who haunts Stafford; his brittle, fearful wife Cristina (Olivia Williams, in the latest in a series of knockout supporting performances), and Agatha's kid brother Benjie. The youngest Weiss is a cruel and territorial former child star who's looking to escape the gilded prison of juvenile idol-hood. Benjie is played by Evan Bird of "The Killing," an actor whose haircut and clipped delivery revoke Frankie Muniz on "Malcolm in the Middle" when the character isn't doing a snotnosed power-broker routine, lounging around nightclubs like Leonard DiCaprio in his post-"Titanic" period. Compared to all these misfits, slimeballs and emotional basket cases, Robert Pattinson's limo driver and aspiring screenwriter Jerome Fontana seems well-adjusted, but as is so often the case with Wagner's characters, you'd best not get too comfortable with him. (This is the second time Pattinson has spent time in a limo for Cronenberg, after "Cosmopolis," and the second time he's delivered a top-notch, blase-sexy-decadent performance.)

I'm not convinced that the film's themes and situations are deep enough or well-articulated enough to deserve the brilliant filmmaking and acting placed in their service. As the story wears on and we glean new bits of information establishing the characters' connections, the story starts to seem less operatically inevitable than contrived and convenient: too neat, and trying to camouflage its too-neatness with wrenching scenes of violence and self-abasement. By the time you get to the end, Cronenberg has pinned all his people against the screen like so many laboratory specimens, ripped off their scabs, and vivisected their longings: an old wound here, a long--deferred dream there. Still, the movie sticks with you. It's a fleeting nightmare that refuses to fade.

The filmmaker compacts the storyline a bit. You're not seeing a point-by-point or shot-by-shot re-creation of the scenes, but an account of their boldest gestures. It's the gestures that jump out at you; they make you realize that classic movie scenes often come down to little things that people do with their faces or bodies.

I didn't realize, for example, that you can boil down the dramatic importance of that entire woodchipper sequence in "Fargo" to one gesture, Marge pointing to the badge on her hat.

I also didn't realize how little detail was necessary to evoke the climactic sequence of "Se7en." The shots are vividly composed, with stark. flat colors and an overwhelming brightness, but in the end they're really defined by the outlines of human bodies on horizon lines, sometimes accompanied by electrical towers or power lines slashing across negative space.

The little directorial flourishes are also lovely. Watch for the shot at the 1:00 mark in Damian's version of the "Ferris Bueller " clip, when the "camera" booms past the "actors" to reveal the wrecked "car"below the house. I didn't really appreciate what a magnificent shot this is until Damian re-drew it in black, white and red.

"Approaching the Elephant" is a documentary about a year in the life of Teddy McArdle Free School in Little Falls, New Jersey, an institution without a curriculum or even set rules. It takes its title from a quote from J.D. Salinger's "Teddy," by way of the old anecdote about the group of blind men feeling an elephant and drawing wrong conclusions based on partial information.

There's a danger of doing exactly that when writing about this peculiar and special nonfiction film. As directed and shot (mostly solo) by first-time feature filmmaker Amanda Rose Wilder, and as edited by Robert Greene ("Actress"), it's a truly old-school documentary, constructed in the manner of a 1960s "direct cinema" or "fly on the wall" feature. It tells its story without music, narration, graphs, or expert witnesses. It's committed to letting you decide what, if anything, it's trying to say, by putting you in the middle of a place, and letting you watch what happens.

That "if anything" is in the preceding sentence for a reason. After watching Wilder's movie a couple of times, I'm convinced that it might not be making any single, statement about free schools. More likely, it's trying to spark arguments about the core issues in education: the need for discipline and lesson plans and set subjects; the question of whether an authoritarian model of leadership is preferable or if you should let children (even very young ones) have a voice.

The first part of the film suffers from a certain aimlessness. It seems a bit coy about deciding who its main characters are. We don't necessarily need to have a conclusion foreshadowed for us. But early on, it's not easy to figure out why we're watching this black-and-white, handheld movie about a school that accepts kids who don't fit into more traditional institutions due to learning problems or discipline issues—a hippie-ish place where anybody, adult or child, can call a meeting and discuss this or that, and students don't have to study a subject if they don't feel like it.

The movie eventually zeroes in the school's founder and main teacher, Alex, and two strong-willed kids: a blank-faced, long-haired boy named Jiovanni, and a sunny-dispositioned blonde girl named Lucy. Lucy likes roughhousing and goofing as much as any of the kids, but also likes to have rules in place, so that you know how far to go, and can ask somebody to back you up when you've decided enough is enough. Jiovanni is a spoiled, argumentative, often destructive brat with no regard for anyone's happiness but his own. As such, he's in the perfect (or worst possible) environment.

This school seems at partly founded around the idea that people have an innate need for rules, laws, structure and so forth, and will eventually act in their best interests when a threat like Jiovanni emerges. Is this true, though? Jiovanni's thuggish behavior keeps making it impossible for the other kids to learn or the teachers to teach, and they seem to take forever to unite against him, maybe because nobody wants to be the "bad guy" and puncture Utopia. Like most narcissists, Jiovanni doesn't care if people hate him as long as they can't ignore him. In time, the other children go from being cowed by Jiovanni to vocally despising him. "I'm getting the feeling that everybody else in the school doesn't want to be driven by Jio's likes," says another boy.

I wouldn't go so far as to say Wilder is "just observing" this conflict. I don't think there is any such thing as objectivity where filmmaking is concerned. The footage was collected one or two days each week over a one-year timespan, then shaped during editing to create a semblance of a narrative that builds to a surprisingly traditional (and exciting) climax.

But it does seem fair to say that "Approaching the Elephant" isn't directing us toward any specific conclusion about what's right and wrong. If anything, it's arranging the footage in a way that will challenge or confirm the viewer's preconceived notions about a good education. ("Is this really working?" Alex asks at one point. "We probably won't know for 20 years.")

The final act, during which the school is essentially held hostage to Jiovanni's snotty whims, made me furious. I don't believe in corporal punishment, but boys like him test that commitment. And even though I think the modern American school system is a quasi-fascistic holdover from an earlier time—designed mainly to teach kids how to be obedient, voiceless cogs in an industrial economy that no longer exists—parts of "Approaching the Elephant" made me wonder if free schools aren't an equally misguided over-correction.

Reactions like mine are, I suspect, the whole point of making this particular film in this particular way. The movie is significant as a movie: it's intelligent, sensitive and expertly made. But it's also significant because of its ability to provoke introspection and arguments. In its deceptively modest way, it's as much a Rorschach test as "American Sniper." Everybody who sees it will draw a different picture of the elephant.

In anticipation of the Academy Awards, we polled our contributors to see who they thought should win the Oscar. Once we had our winners, we asked various writers to make the case for our selection in each category. Here, Matt Zoller Seitz makes the case for the Best Picture of 2014: "Selma".

A rare historical film that speaks to its audience rather than yelling at it or hiding from it, "Selma" is also sneakily radical: not in terms of its politics, but its style. Hollywood storytellers are often criticized for sticking with the so-called "Great Man" approach to history. Even when the man in question is in fact great—as the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was—it betrays a lack of imagination, not to mention an unsophisticated view of how history actually happens. It's not just a matter of one inspirational voice exhorting crowds of strangers to do the right (or wrong) thing; it's an amalgamation of thoughts and decisions, strategies and counter-strategies, all of which lead to a particular outcome slowly and often imperceptibly, as a river winds itself across a plain.

"Selma," credited to screenwriter Paul Webb and director Ava DuVernay, understands this on a deep level, and proves it by laying out the story in a decentralized, small-d democratic way, spreading around its opportunities for heroism and pettiness, and making even larger-than-life characters seem refreshingly life-sized, and allowing its characters to have multiple reasons for saying and doing things, some idealistic, others self-serving. King, played by David Oyelowo, visits Selma, Alabama to dismantle the legacy of Jim Crow, but also to keep the current wave of protests moving after a disappointing setback in Albany, Ga., where the sheriff treated protesters humanely. There's a sense throughout that King is an idealist but also a pragmatist, and that he's frustrated by the amount of work it takes to keep the general public interested, and by how slowly things change, and requires a certain amount of "drama" (his word) to ignite outrage and then participation.

The entire film is rooted in this kind of real-world attention to psychology and the role that plays in politics: you can see it in King's jailhouse doubt-riddled jailhouse conversation with Ralph David Abernathy (Colman Young). You can see it in the police beatdown of Annie Lee Cooper (Oprah Winfrey), whose protest is foreshadowed in an early scene where she's denied the right to vote.

You can see it in the hushed conversation between Coretta Scott King (Carmen Ejogo) and Malcolm X (Nigel Thatch) in which the Black Muslim suggests letting him serve as a threat to the White man and King as the alternative. You can see it in Martin Sheen's deliberations as a judge who has the power to stop police interference with a protest, and in the scenes of clergy answering King's call to join the second march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, a sequence thoughtfully scored to the song "Masters of War," its folk inflections signaling how Civil Rights protests widened to take in people of all races, ethnicities and faiths. "Selma" is a great film not just because of what it shows, but because of who it includes. In the manner of any preacher who understands how to get the message out, it pitches a big tent.

With "Gett, the Trial of Viviane Amsalem," siblings Ronit and Shlomi Elkabetz prove that they rank with the finest filmmakers alive.

Every shot, cut, line, performance, indeed every moment in this feature is perfectly judged, always conveying precisely what it needs to convey in order to define its characters and move the story forward. And yet the result never seems merely neat or efficient. Even though "Gett" tells of 45-year-old Israeli woman seeking a divorce from her domineering husband, and makes unsettling points about what it means to be a woman in a religiously conservative country (or a woman in any society), the film is less an object lesson, lecture, or problem picture than a comedy-drama about the complexity of people and the elusiveness of truth.

Most of the film takes place in a small courtroom, with the plaintiff, Viviane (co-director Ronit Elkabetz, who's also an accomplished actress), suing her husband Elisha (Simon Abkarian of "Zero Dark Thirty") for divorce. For women, divorce is much harder to obtain in Israel than in other Westernized countries. In fact, the husband holds most of the cards and rarely has to lay any of them down. The male-dominated, religiously orthodox panel of judges overseeing the case (led by Rabbi Solomon, played by Mandy Patinkin-lookalike Eli Gornstein) insists on a high standard of proof from Viviane—so high, in fact, that what should be a simple matter of filling out forms becomes an ordeal that would tax the patience of Job.

As depicted here, an Israeli woman can't split from her spouse without proving extraordinary abuse or neglect. A simple assertion of "We don't get along" or "This marriage was a mistake" is not enough. All the husband has do to preserve the status quo is avoid taking action—and that's what Elisha, a magnetic yet tactically aloof man, does in the first part of "Gett," asking for delays, failing to show up in court, and otherwise stonewalling and dragging things out in an attempt to wear Viviane down. He doesn't want to grant her wish. We wonder why. There seems to be little love left between them. Is his intransigence a matter of male pride: the fear of losing face? Or does he truly love her, so much that he'd rather be miserable with her than let her go?

The movie keeps us guessing, and even as it tightens the emotional screws, it never stops being enjoyable. That's because the filmmakers treat the courtroom as a golden opportunity for people-watching. Both the judges' elevated bench and the small tables at which the plaintiffs and defendants sit or stand feel like halves of a stage. Viviane and Elisha mostly seethe in silence, listening as their lawyers spar. The barristers are very different but seem evenly matched: pragmatic, skeptical Carmel (Menashe Noy) stumps for the plaintiff; the defendant is represented by his wily and talkative brother Shimon (Sasson Gabai), whose folksy demeanor becomes at once more endearing and more unsettling once you figure out that it's his most potent weapon.

Center stage is a smaller, podium-like table where character witnesses for Viviane and Elisha come to testify. When we get accustomed to the movie's distinctive rhythms, we lean forward in our seats a little bit whenever a new face appears, because we know the character is going to be different from, but as fascinating as, whoever stood there last.

Part of the fun lies in watching these witnesses come in with a rehearsed, polished story, only to relinquish it once judges and opposing counsel start poking holes in their facades. The cream of the crop includes Viviane's sister-in-law Rachel, a volcanically spirited woman whose testimony becomes a comic tirade against the inequities of male-female relations and the sham of marriage-as-partnership. There are also great, wise bits of observational humor involving the witnesses' inability or refusal to take direction from the judges.

The inertia at the heart of Viviane's plight makes watching "Gett" an unexpectedly tense and claustrophobic experience. For a film in which the characters do a lot of talking but not much moving around, and that unfolds in a handful of mostly small and plain locations, it's as relentless as an action-adventure picture. This is partly because the stakes are so basic and clear (Viviane is miserable and depressed, and wants to be free and happy) but also because the filmmakers have chosen to tell the story in a highly, ahem, unorthodox way: by adopting the perspectives of different characters from one moment to the next; positioning their shots so subjectively, and with such geographical precision, that we feel as though we've been dropped into a new consciousness, and allowed to see through fresh eyes. We might wonder why we're seeing a character in profile for several long seconds, or from a very low angle, or partly hidden behind another character's shoulder, and then a cut will establish who's doing the looking, and all at once we find ourselves thinking about what the information at that particular moment means to the person who's seeing and hearing it as it's being delivered.

The film's stylistic boldness might not have been necessary: the script is so tight and and propulsive and the large cast so skilled that the moviemakers could have just pointed the camera at the characters and probably created a reasonably thoughtful and engaging drama. But the direction is a masterstroke because it adds a literary or even poetic dimension to the movie, finding a visual analogue to the idea that the truth varies depending on who you are and where you stand.

The filmmakers' previous work, "To Take a Wife" and "7 Days," were superb as well, but this one is a step up in ambition and exactness. Every touch enriches or builds out the story, and yet "Gett" never loses focus on the heroine's plight. We're always with her, and often the throwaway touches are more devastating than the larger setbacks, as when a judge asks her if she wants water, and she politely declines, and a bailiff leaves the room anyway. You just know he's going to return with a glass of water anyway, and sure enough, he does. Rarely has such a simple gesture so clearly communicated what it means to be the heroine in a narrative you cannot control.

Editor's note: This is the eighth in a series of videos about the films of Wes Anderson, written and narrated by me, and produced in collaboration with my regular editor and filmmaking partner Steven Santos. The books were illustrated by Max Dalton and designed by Martin Venezsky, artists showcased in the videos along with stills and production material from Anderson's movies. You can view the rest of the videos, plus interviews and more, by clicking here.

The narration is drawn from the following introduction to The Wes Anderson Collection: The Grand Budapest Hotel, which you can order here. For more details about this book and its predecessor, The Wes Anderson Collection, click here.

“We were happy here. For a little
while.”

—Zero Moustafa

All of Wes Anderson’s films are
comedies, and none are. There is always a melancholic undertone, buried
just deep enough beneath artifice and artistry that you don’t see it
right away.

Such is
the case with The Grand Budapest Hotel,
his eighth and most structurally ambitious movie. After a first viewing, you
come away remembering the wit and motion, and wit in motion, of this tale within a tale within a tale.
A dowager countess is murdered, a foppish concierge named Gustave is framed and
imprisoned, a nation is plunged into war as fascism’s specter looms, but these
dire events are cushioned by colors, textures, and madcap chases.

When you recall
the film, you quote the quotable lines: “She was dynamite in the sack, by the
way.” “I apologize on behalf of the hotel.” “May I
offer any of you inmates a plate of mush?” You envision farcical set pieces:
the normally unflappable Gustave trying to escape the cops sent to arrest him
by turning tail and sprinting; the Rube Goldberg-esque prison break, complete
with tools hidden in pastries, a seemingly endless rope ladder, and the
rhythmic tapping of hammers on bars; Gustave and his lobby boy Zero on a
bobsled, chasing the assassin Jopling down a tree-lined slalom. You savor the details of costuming, special
effects, set design, and cinematography: the pink hotel; the funicular; Madame
D.’s Marie Antoinette-by-way-of-Elsa-Lanchester hairdo; a dresser-top packed with
Gustave’s signature scent, L'Air de Panache; Jopling’s skull-shaped knuckle-dusters;
those exquisite pastries in those exquisite boxes; the way the frame changes
shape, depending on where you are in the story.

The whole
film is further buoyed not just by a sense of invention, but reinvention. The heroes
are people who have re-created themselves, or tried to. Madame D., weighed down
by propriety and matriarchal responsibility and memories of youthful vigor,
escapes into fantasy with Gustave, the only person in her life who treated her
tenderly in her dotage, and wills him the painting that (eventually) changes
his life, as well as Zero’s. The inmates, incarcerated for all manner of
crimes, escape prison alongside Gustave, then pile into a taxi and disappear
into the wider world. Agatha, an apprentice baker, becomes an action heroine,
helping her love retrieve 'Boy with Apple'
at great risk to herself. We never find out the details of Gustave’s history,
but we don’t need to. We see through his cultivated façade each time he
intersperses his coy “darling”s with expletives or momentarily (sometimes
tactically) forgets to be a gentleman. The L'Air de Panache stands in for his
persona: The man has perfumed his entire life.

But with each successive viewing, a funny, really not-so-funny thing happens: The veil of
lightness lifts to reveal a film that would be unbearably sad if it weren’t cushioned
by comedy and dolled up with spectacle. You find yourself dreading the moments
of darkness more acutely: Joplin hacking off Deputy Kovacs’s fingers via
sliding metal door; Zero in black-and-white, taking a rifle butt across the
face; darling Agatha marrying Zero on a mountaintop as old Zero informs us that
she, and their infant son, died two years later of the Prussian grippe. As you watch and re-watch, the film’s wit
and motion never recede completely, but you may feel a pang as you realize that,
like so many Wes Anderson pictures, The
Grand Budapest Hotel is about loss, and how we come to terms with loss—or
never do.

Say
the film’s title again after a second or third viewing, and the emblematic
image becomes the face of old Zero, a man so shattered by the losses of his
best friend and his great love that he can’t bear to describe their demises in
detail. He allocates just six words to Gustave’s execution at the hands of
“pockmarked fascist assholes,” a moment pictured in plain-facts black-and-white
that makes him a part of history before he can become history: “In the end, they shot him.” Agatha’s death gets
three sentences, one of which describes the illness that killed her as “An
absurd little disease.” De nada, it’s
nothing; and now, we try to move on.

The
most important parts of a story are the parts people omit, the abysses they
sidestep. Zero gifts the Author with details about Gustave, the hotel, the
country, the war, and various colorful supporting characters; in so doing, he hands
the young visitor a legacy that transforms him into a legacy himself: a beloved
author treasured by his nation. But Zero is not an open book. Whenever he’s
about to lose himself in a reverie for Agatha, he catches himself and changes
the subject. We often see her from a distance: riding her bike while the
soundtrack swells romantically; gazing adoringly at Zero, carousel lights
haloing her face. She is a nearly absent presence in the story, by Zero’s
choice: a narrative door marked “Do Not Enter.” He won’t speak of her. It’s too
painful, and he’s too private.

His
need to share his story is keen (Zero approaches the Author, not the other way
around), but never so keen that he’s willing to open an abyss and gaze into it.
No matter how attentively Zero speaks or listens to his audience of one, some sliver
of his mind seems to be on that mountaintop, marrying Agatha under the
supervision of his ordained best friend who’ll soon be put down like a dog. He
keeps the hotel because it reminds him of Agatha. The painting—a cheeky vision
of innocence that he encouraged Gustave to steal, setting the film’s main plot
in motion—now hangs behind the concierge desk, and is featured on the backs of
the hotel’s menus, where every guest’s dining companion must at least briefly
regard it. Zero lives in the past. He invites the Author into it, but not too
deeply. Something in Zero is broken; he is in no rush to fix it, and nearly as
disinclined to explore it. Remembering is dangerous. He knows this. He helps
the Author understand this. It is a simple fact, certified, among many other
ways, by the theatrical shadows that darken Zero’s face as he prepares to
revisit the past.

The Grand Budapest Hotel is inspired, as a
closing dedication card informs us, by the works of Stefan Zweig. The Austrian
author fled his beloved Vienna as World War I ramped up and the continent
burned. He watched it spiral further into madness during the second world war,
then settled in Petropolis, Brazil, and took his own life, along with his
second wife Charlotte E. Altmann. His memoir The World
of Yesterday is a Proustian love letter to Vienna, the great city he
adored, then left because he couldn’t bear to see it soiled by anti-intellectualism
and thuggish tribalism. We see bits and pieces of Zweig represented in the
film’s story, setting ,and images (including the young Author, the old Author,
and Gustave, all of whom physically resemble Zweig in various ways), but as is
so often the case in Wes Anderson’s films, The
Grand Budapest Hotel comes at reality, historical and personal, in an
oblique and fanciful way. This Europe is no more “real,” in the Encyclopedia
Britannica sense, than the Rushmore Academy, the 375th Street Y, or Pescespada Island.
Yet the characters’ emotions are real, and their deaths feel as real as the
blood that spills from Richie Tenenbaum’s slashed wrists and clouds the water
near Steve Zissou’s wrecked helicopter. Anderson’s movies are filled with
personal abysses, and if the scripts tread lightly around them, it’s only
because the characters are living in them, and, on some level, we know it, and we
can feel it.

In this way—glancingly, discreetly—the
movie honors Zweig’s losses: of national identity, of youthful idealism, of
life itself. Fear of loss, and agonizing knowledge of loss, fuel the film’s
characters, as surely as it fuels motherless Max Fischer’s productivity and
distractedness, Mr. Fox’s reckless adventurism, and the Whitman brothers’
journey across India. In a wide shot of the hotel, we see that it’s built into
a mountainside and rises elegantly against it, but down near the bottom of the
frame is a hole, and spilling out of it is black coal that’s presumably fed
into the building’s furnaces. Loss fuels Zero, a man described by the Author as
the only person in the hotel who struck him as “deeply and truly” lonely, and
confirms that impression tenfold.

Why
does Zero speak to a young writer he meets in the baths? Why does he unburden
himself, to the extent that a polite and naturally reticent man could? Perhaps
it’s for the same reason that Steve Zissou makes films; that Max Fischer writes
and directs plays; that Jack Whitman writes short fiction; that Mrs. Fox paints
and Mr. Fox writes newspaper columns; and that Dignan chronicles a “75-year
plan” in his spiral notebook: to channel those unexpressed anxieties, give them
shape, and, ideally, master them—rather than be mastered by them.

But
also, and most importantly, to make sure that some part of each of them lives
on. The decay of the body is irreversible,. Death is non-negotiable. As
Professor Keating tells his students in Dead
Poets Society, someday, we’ll all be fertilizing daffodils. And then what’s
left? Stories. The Grand Budapest Hotel
treats storytelling itself as an inheritance bequeathed to anyone who’s willing
to listen, feel, and remember, then repeat the story, with whatever
embellishments are necessary to personalize it and make it mean something to
the teller. And so the story begins with a young woman visiting a statue of the
Author and staring down in wonder at the (nonexistent) novel that supplied the
story we’re about to see, a story set in (nonexistent) country that’s been
remade by war, a story told in a hotel that’s been remade by brute force
coupled with ideology, a story recounted by an Author who first heard it from a
lonely old man who finished his tale with what sounds almost like a
benediction: ‘I think his world had
vanished long before he ever entered it,” he says of Gustave, his mentor, his
father figure, his brother, speaking also of himself, and the Author who’ll
spin his yarn into literary gold. “But, I will say: he certainly sustained the
illusion with a marvelous grace!” Shortly thereafter, the elevator doors slide
shut like a book’s covers closing.

The
film’s final moments drive home the notion of stories as inheritances,
currencies, legacies, gifts. We see the old Author sitting quietly on a couch
beside his grandson. He’s wearing a version of the Norfolk suit he wore the
night that he spoke to Zero—a night that we now sense was one of the most
important he would ever experience—and he’s in a study (uncompleted, judging
from the half-painted walls in the room beyond) whose décor echoes that of the hotel,
circa 1968. His grandson is beside him. The old Author’s voice supplants the
younger’s: “It was an enchanting, old ruin—but I never managed to see it
again.”

Then
we return to the young woman in the cemetery as she closes the book and stares
at it. Perhaps she’s contemplating the larger meaning of the story she just read,
or re-read, and wondering what she’ll take from it, or do with it. Or maybe
she’s just thinking she wants to read it again, amid the tombstones. Life
destroys. Art preserves.

]]>
tag:www.rogerebert.com,2005:BlogPost/54da309dcd3b56dc1b0000652015-02-16T00:45:00-06:002015-02-16T09:20:20-06:00Terrence Malick's Cathedrals of Cinema: Excerpt from "Faith and Spirituality in Masters of World Cinema, Vol. 3"Matt Zoller Seitz

The following is my introduction to Faith and Spirituality in Masters of World Cinema, the newest volume in an ongoing anthology series about religion in movies. Edited by Kenneth R. Morefield and Nicholas S. Olson, it features a variety of pieces on filmmakers past and present. Most would more likely be described as passionate or perhaps "spiritual" filmmakers rather than explicitly religious ones, and as such, they've inspired some fascinating readings. Olson, for instance writes about paths to spirituality in the films of Asghar Farhadi, while Alissa Wilkinson contributes a piece on images of Eden in the films of Kelly Reichardt, and Andrew Johnson writes on "pain as a pathway to epiphany" in the work of Darren Aronofsky. It is a great honor to have been asked to contribute to a volume that gathers so many fine writers together in pursuit of such a worthy and elusive subject.--Matt Zoller Seitz

Devoted—or devout—moviegoers often describe the experience of seeing a film in a theater, with its communal response to an artist’s themes, images and “message,” as a quasi-religious experience. This is common even among viewers who have no experience with, or interest in, the traditions or the texts of organized religion, much less a belief in any particular god or gods. I suspect devoted is one way of describing the sort of contributor that Faith and Spirituality in Masters of World Cinema, now in this its third volume, attracts. For me—a critic who was raised among Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses, but whose own religious leanings tend more toward the agnostic or atheist end of the spectrum—cinema’s quasi-religious potency evokes feelings of awe, or reverence, for the mysteries of human experience that I’ve rarely felt in houses of worship.

One filmmaker in particular has captured—even sharpened—my attention in this way for years.

Instinctively, I wrote that in my 2005 New York Press review of Malick’s The New World, not realizing all the ways in which it was true. What I was trying to get at was the sense of wonder that the filmmaker evokes. Malick awakens this response quite strongly among those who respond to his work, and in my own admittedly anecdotal experience, I’ve found little difference in response between those who consider themselves specifically religious, generally “spiritual,” agnostic, or atheist. There’s something about the way Malick shoots, cuts and scores action—the things he chooses to show us or not show us; the things he considers significant—that evokes these feelings.

The biographical facts give us some insight, even if these alone don’t illuminate his artistry. We know that his parents were Assyrian Christian immigrants, that his name is one of the Names of God in the Qur'an—one that means The King, or the Lord of Worlds, or King of Kings. We know that he grew up in former Confederate states where derivations of Christianity dominate and the landscape is dotted with as many crosses as you’d find in Brazil. I’ve been told by people who know and work with him (he’s famously private) that since the 1990s he’s aligned himself with a benevolently evangelical strain of belief, and that his collaborators see him as a mysterious and obsessive but essentially kind guru who loves nature hikes and bird watching. We know that he’s always been preoccupied with phenomenology and with Wittgenstein and Husserl, and that at Harvard he studied under the film philosopher Stanley Cavell, a disciple of Martin Heidegger. We know that he became so enamored with Heidegger via Cavell that he spent a semester at Oxford studying with him, wrote his senior thesis on his work, translated his lecture “The Essence of Reason” from German, and after failing to finish his PhD, tried to teach a course on the philosopher at MIT.

However, none of these influences are so bound up with Malick’s films that the movies are impossible to enjoy without completing a reading list first. For all of his fascination with philosophy, history and theology, Malick’s art is primarily driven by picture and sound, much more so than most commercial filmmakers. Malick’s biographers seem to agree that filmmaking represented a continuation of his philosophical and spiritual inquiries by other means, and his cinematic inquiry has taken on a notoriously intuitive path. It’s impossible to “read” or decode Malick’s movies as if they were puzzles or riddles; one must instead enter into them, absorb them and in some ways surrender to them. But this way of describing the personal investment his films require is not to discount analysis; rather, it suggests that critique coming from some “objective,” arms-length perspective won’t begin to suggest the wealth of beauty and insight offered by his work.

For me, the wonder of Malick’s cinema is rooted in a concretely expressed humility that contradicts the tendencies of all but a handful of commercial narrative films. The standard model for screenplays is a three-act story in which a protagonist pursues some sort of goal. Everyone else in the story is judged in relation to the hero’s quest, and thus everyone is slotted into particular roles that are determined mainly by how much they help or hurt the hero, and how much screen time they get: the best friend, the love interest, the mentor, perhaps a villain and his or her henchpersons. This is what you might call the geocentric model of narrative, reinforcing our selfish and myopic wish to believe that life revolves around us, when in fact we’re but one of billions of individual planets in a universe whose center is mysterious, and whose rules remain inscrutable no matter how hard we try to understand them.

Malick never had much interest in the geocentric model of narrative, and over the decades he’s been increasingly pointed in his rejection of it. From "Badlands" onward the writer-director has made increasingly sprawling, swirling, visually and aurally collage-driven films. He’s become increasingly less interested in straightforward linear plotting and more inclined to ruminate, meander, and riff. This tendency manifests itself most strikingly in the way that Malick diminishes his protagonists. He often does this by reminding us that as emotionally overwhelming as life can be while we’re living it, we’re ultimately just intelligent mammals inhabiting the same ecosystem on the same small planet in the same unfathomably vast universe. The tension between the importance of individual desires and the indifference of society and nature fuels every creative choice he makes, and fosters that simultaneous, seemingly contradictory feeling that we’re on the outside and the inside of life at the same time, plagued by feelings of meaninglessness and hopelessness even as love and beauty reassure us that there is a point to everything—that all mysteries will be solved, all secrets revealed, somehow, some way.

When I think of Malick, the first images that spring to mind are from a sequence near the end of his 1978 film, "Days of Heaven." The film is a historical drama about a love triangle between two lovers posing as brother and sister (Richard Gere’s Bill and Brooke Adams’s Abby) and the rich but sickly farmer (Sam Shepard) that they try to ensnare to provide a better life for themselves and for Bill’s kid sister Linda (Linda Manz). Complications ensue: Abby’s pretend love for the farmer becomes real, Bill becomes jealous and leaves her and then returns, there’s a struggle in which the farmer dies, and the intrepid trio takes off again, only to be tracked down by Pinkerton detectives. Bill fires on his pursuers and is shot dead, falling face down in the water of the river where he and Linda and Abby had pitched camp. A shockingly abrupt cutaway from Bill’s face in the water—in extreme close-up—gives way to a series of images of Bill’s body floating downstream, then to the detectives lifting his corpse from the water and Abby and Linda weeping.

The most telling shot, though, is a wide shot of a group of children and adults on the riverbank, watching the detectives retrieve Bill’s corpse. All at once we’re torn out of Bill’s and Abby’s and Linda’s story, and thrown into a world beyond their troubles. We’ve just witnessed the end of a powerful love triangle climaxing in a man’s death by gunfire, but to the people on the riverbank, Bill is just a stranger who got shot that day at the river. We see this diminishing strategy again a couple of scenes later when Abby goes to a train station and watches soldiers boarding to go fight World War I. Europe has been in conflagration for years, it seems. The viewers, having spent most of the film isolated on Texas Panhandle farmland, were not aware of this. For most of the movie we had no idea of when, exactly, the story was taking place. When the seasons changed we didn’t know what year had ended and which one had begun.

Malick does this time and time again, in film after film: he’ll cut from a moment of extreme, often subjective personal trauma to a wide shot putting individual experience in a cosmic context, showing you a field of waving wheat or jungle grasslands or undulating ocean waves, or coral reefs and fish, or sunlight streaming through canopied foliage, or insects or birds or animals. As early as Badlands, Malick was using cutaways to ironically puncture his characters’ delusions of centrality—cutting from close-ups of the fugitives Kit (Martin Sheen) and Holly (Sissy Spacek) slow-dancing by the road at night to a wide shot reducing them to silhouetted cutouts slowly spinning in the beams of a park car’s headlights, or cutting from one of Holly’s romance fiction-modeled diary entries (read in Malick’s trademark voice-over) to rack-focus shots of tree branches and leaves and beetles.

"Days of Heaven" goes further still, showing the main drama (the love triangle) through the eyes of a barely adolescent girl who can’t fully understand what’s happening to her brother and his girlfriend, much less to the world they inhabit, and stressing the cyclical repetition of seasons, which obliquely suggest that the events we are witnessing will recur again, perhaps in a different guise—if not in these characters’ lives, then perhaps in those of others.

In his war drama, "The Thin Red Line," which has multiple narrators, the mortal distress of grunts ducking bullets or screaming in agony is often diminished, gently but firmly, by cutaways to close-ups of animals: a snake surprising a Marine in tall grass during a firefight, or a first-person point-of-view shot of a leaf perforated by the teeth of long-gone insects, the sunlight streaming through the green as if through bullet holes. The film starts with a close-up of a crocodile gliding into green muck, as if to remind us of the dinosaurs that predated our sojourn in a past so distant that we can hardly imagine it, and its final shot isn’t of soldiers or war but of a sprouting coconut poking through surf. “Why does nature war with itself?” one of the film’s many narrators asks, reminding us that we are a part of the ecosystem even as we trample or burn it.

Malick’s John Smith-Pocahantas drama, "The New World," has three narrators (though more often John, depending on which version you’re watching), juxtaposes the European settlers’ indifference to or contempt for nature against the natives’ deep connection with it, and presents the stories of both individuals and nation-states alike as hiccups on the world’s timeline, almost charmingly minor when considered in the shadow of tall trees soaring high above us, their branches creaking in the wind.

"The Tree of Life" takes this approach as far as it can, framing its wandering, ruminative story as the memory of one man, an architect, but also dipping into the consciousness of his mother and father and other characters, pivoting back and forth in time without warning, and sometimes slipping into fantasies or reveries that show seemingly uncanny or overtly metaphorical events: a child swimming through a room in which the laws of gravity have been suspended; the mother floating in air like the matriarch in Andrei Tarkovsky’s "The Sacrifice;" the architect visiting a desert plain on which dead loved ones have gathered.

The film’s oft-discussed, sometimes contentious, and certainly memorable creation sequence presents the architect’s life and the life of the human race collectively as the endpoint of billions of years of evolution. This seems, in context of Malick’s other films, like a way of gently mocking the geocentric model of drama, even as the film takes the characters’ pain and joy with utmost seriousness. It affirms the inescapable centrality of personal experience in each life while at the same time infusing that worldview with an awareness of the infinite breadth of time and space. Even his most recent film, "To the Wonder," practices this strategy of benevolent diminishment, imbuing shots of present-day suburban Oklahoma tract houses, ditches, and Sonic drive-in restaurants with a shimmering sense of possibility. The movie seems to detect a radiant, even holy beauty pulsing beneath or beyond the landscape that its characters often take for granted, and even contextualizes the movie’s longing for transcendence as a desire to get closer to God, or beyond ourselves (Javier Bardem’s ruminating priest serves as the mediator between the movie and us). We are not the centers of the universe, Malick’s films seem to suggest, but at the same time the storehouse of human experience is a given universe unto itself. This may be the essence of Terrence Malick: human beings are infinitely small and yet infinitely significant. Why? Because we ask why; because we wonder.

It’s this sort of meaningful and sensible contemplation that many people seek by reading scripture, meditating, or visiting houses of worship. They seek to lose themselves to find themselves, and to contemplate their significance within the wider scheme, however large or small that may be. I can think of few better places to turn than this, a compelling volume on faith, spirituality, and cinema, when looking for the meaningful and the sensible.

"Da Sweet Blood of Jesus" is Spike Lee's first crowdfunded feature and his second remake in a row, following "Oldboy" (a film I liked better than most critics), but as you might expect, given the defiantly idiosyncratic nature of this director, it's not content to be a rehash.

The movie follows the template of its source material, Bill Gunn's cult favorite "Ganja and Hess," pretty closely, and even evokes its sorrowful, romantic, dreamy tone as it portrays a love affair between two bloodlusting individuals; but it's connected to the real world. It works through many of Lee's familiar preoccupations (including racism, cultural assimilation, class anxiety, capitalistic exploitation and addiction) in such a blunt way that it might fit nicely on a double bill with "Jungle Fever" or "Summer of Sam." The latter were dismissed as jumbled messes by many, but had an undeniable feverish intensity, as if the writer-director were determined to work through every sociopolitical issue obsessing him at that moment; like many of his films, but even more so, they were kitchen-sink dramas, sermons, music videos and tragedies all at the same time, the individual aspects working at cross-purposes with each other, often thrillingly and sometimes to the films' detriment.

But Lee's most persistent problem, an inability to unify his messages and make them cohere, doesn't really hurt him in "Da Sweet Blood of Jesus" because the film is a hypnotically nightmarish mood piece more than anything else; it makes sense and yet doesn't make sense, in the way that dreams do and don't make sense. Ideas bleed into other ideas and morph into third, tangentially related ideas; notions are teased and then dropped; almost unbearably savage violence is perpetrated on characters who often have done nothing to deserve their fates; not once does Lee trouble himself with questions of likability, much less the possibility that he's following his own muse to the point where he's losing people. This will prove either maddening or refreshing, depending on whether your willingness to go where Lee takes you overwhelms your desire for something more conventionally neat and clearheaded.

Stage actor Stephen Tyrone Williams stars as Dr. Hess Greene, a noted anthropologist studying the ancient Ashanti Empire. In the opening scene, he comes into possession of an ancient dagger that triggers a complete change in his world, which is centered around a handsome Martha's Vineyard estate that measures exactly (ahem) 40 acres. The story, such as it is, kicks into gear when his depressed research assistant, Dr. Hightower (Elvis Nolasco), attempts suicide, then grapples murderously with Hess in a close-quarters struggle involving the dagger. Without giving too much away, let's say that this struggle ends with Hess transformed into a nightcrawling loner with a thirst for human blood.

The term "bloodsuckers" has all sorts of political and metaphorical meanings, and many a vampire movie has playfully toyed with them. "Ganja and Hess," a film that emerged less than a decade into the era of black power politics, was one of the more notable examples, and Lee, rewriting Gunn's original script, attempts something similar here. In the run-up to the movie's production, the filmmaker kept insisting that "Jesus" was not, strictly speaking, a vampire movie, and while that assertion seems a bit coy (vampires are pretty obviously what we're dealing with) it isn't inaccurate. Hess and many of the other African-American and afro-Caribbean characters are presented as living somewhere in between, or beyond, two familiar movie worlds, the Black inner city and the tony coastal enclaves of wealthy Whites. White "bloodsuckers" are glimpsed at Gatsby-like parties on Hess's estate, and talk of how the engines of capitalism grind up the powerless indicts America itself as a kind of vampire empire.

But "Jesus" moves beyond that to show Hess as a literal and figurative bloodsucker himself, stealing precious bags of red from blood banks, preying on desperate and too-trusting people of color (including a young single mother) to satisfy his unquenchable thirst, and being enabled and in some cases egged on by his new lover Ganja (British actress Zaraah Abraham, camping up the exotic bitchery and exuding poise and menace) and his Renfield-like assistant Seneschal (Rami Malek).

And, as in "Jungle Fever," "Summer of Sam," "Mo' Better Blues" and so many other Spike Lee joints, there's a fascination with addiction, and how it overwhelms empathy and dignity. Without putting too fine a point on it, "Jesus" presents all sorts of traditions and institutions as engines of exploitation as well. The U.S. economy, the worship of guns and machismo, and the desire of minorities to get ahead by any means necessary are all seen as manifestations of addiction, or vampirism. It's all one enormous, multi-tentacled argument, and as you've gathered, Lee has trouble controlling it; but again, the horror genre is one of the only genres where it's OK, or at least acceptable, to be imprecise, because it's more often about sustaining a feeling or a mood than making a case.

The most impressive thing about "Jesus" is its unfailing control of tone. This is manifested in Lee's immaculate and uncharacteristically clean, even sterile, widescreen compositions (shot by Daniel Patterson); Barry Alexander Brown's scalpel-exact edits; and the score, which switches between rap/R&B and Bruce Hornsby's introspective solo piano riffs, but always keeps the volume high. Even the more stilted conversations feel less like freestanding lines than lyrics in a two-hour visual and musical tapestry.

This is clearly intentional: although Lee hasn't done a straight-up musical since "School Daze," his movies often tilt in that direction. This one dives into it headfirst—starting with the dazzling opening credits sequence, which sees dancer Charles "Li'L Buck" Riley gliding, twisting, spiraling and twirling across an array of Red Hook, Brooklyn locations—and keeps it going through a gospel performance late in the movie in which Black American Christianity gets pulled into the film's matrix of addiction and transcendence.

It's impossible to say what, exactly, Lee had in mind when he undertook this project, but whether you like the result or not, you damn sure know you've seen something not quite like anything else (including its inspiration), made with a sense of passionate engagement.